


The Whirlwind Family Circus

by thenewbuzwuzz



Series: Meerkat AU [1]
Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: 19th Century, Alternate Universe - Circus, Alternate Universe - Horrortale, Alternate Universe - Human, Animal Abuse, Animal Transformation, Bittersweet Ending, Circus, Crack, Creepy, Curses, Dark Crack, Fairy Tale Elements, Flying Dutchman, Footnotes, Horror, I mean I thought it was all funny but, I really cannot stress the ''creepy'' enough, Kidnapping, No vampires, Other, Probably Not As Dark As It Sounds, Puns & Word Play, Slavery, Snakes, WELL NOT EXACTLY BUT, animal rights, canon ships, gibbon joints are cool, lion taming, on the bright side Darla gives birth to herself, um some characters sort of marry animals ambiguously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-09
Updated: 2017-09-09
Packaged: 2018-12-27 00:53:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,498
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12070416
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thenewbuzwuzz/pseuds/thenewbuzwuzz
Summary: Welcome to Cobra!Spike's sprawling backstory. A tale of doom and mystery featuring... a most spooky albino cobra! Drusilla the snake girl: part human, part living enigma! Darla, an equestrian genius… twice! Angelus, an artist of much sophistication both onstage and behind the scenes! Zebras that tap dance! A wolf that fights crime! And, of course, old ringmaster Heinrich Nest, Europe’s first lion tamer and notable hobby preacher.





	The Whirlwind Family Circus

**Author's Note:**

> Attention: this isn't like my previously posted meerkat stories. There's much more horror and practically no meerkats.  
> There are still puns and animals, though.  
> As always, feel free to tell me about my rookie mistakes so I can work on avoiding them. I'd also prefer to know if anything is still seriously confusing.  
> Yuki Makimura is not my invention but a historical Japanese slayer who the Master turned (mentioned in the comics - thanks, Buffy wiki!).  
> Deepest thanks to tumblr user alightintheswamp for coherence beta.

If you ever get to go backstage in an older circus building in Europe, if you look very closely and thoroughly, you may notice a small hole in the roof. I saw it myself in the Cirque d’Hiver in Paris, and I've heard it was the same in most of the historical buildings of the Budapest Circus, for example. Most tour guides will just say it’s “for luck”, but if you get someone with slightly more experience, they might let you know that this is a safety measure against the Whirlwind.

You’ve probably heard of the Whirlwind. There are many stories about them... and some of them go a bit like this.

The story starts in the late 1830s. There were countless circus companies in Europe and the US then, and one of them belonged to a man called Heinrich Joseph Nest. Like most circuses at the time, they focussed on trick riding – Nest's wife Darla was especially great at it. They also had a menagerie, and they were just starting to try some animal taming. The story goes that one night, they were returning from a tour of England towards London. Nest wanted to reach London early the next morning, because he knew there would be a new shipment of exotic animals, and he didn't want the competition to buy all the best ones. By midnight, they reached a town – most probably Hemel Hempstead, but some say it was St Albans (and that this incident caused a tree to start talking*). There were maybe 6 hours to go till London. The night was, as it happens, dark and stormy, and, what's worse, Darla was very pregnant. Everyone begged Nest to stay at an inn, but he said something like,  
“There will be no ‘sheltering from the elements’. We shall all keep going until we have enough animals. Even if it takes till Judgment Day.”  
Some say… well, everyone who ever tells this story says that in a flash of lightning, a female figure could be seen standing over Darla and a voice intoned, “Done.”

Neither Nest's staff nor his wife dared to question their master. They kept going. But no sooner had they passed the first alley that their coaches crashed, and Darla gave birth then and there. She died soon after, but the child survived. Nobody knows what the baby girl was originally named, but she started performing very soon and took her mother’s stage name. So she was known as Darla.

In the following weeks, Nest and the rest of the circus noticed something. Every time any of them entered a building, the roof collapsed. A falling beam even killed the strongman, Kralik, while he was practicing for a chain act. Luckily, mass production happened to be reknitting the very fabric of Victorian society, so Nest took advantage of the ensuing railways. He had a special circus train made, and they toured. The circus artists speculated there must have been a hole in the roof of every train carriage and marquee tent, based purely on how moist and drafty they got.

Nest himself performed as a lion tamer. The performances weren’t anything fancy; it was all about power. Most of the shows were just Nest going into the cage and surviving. He struck fear into the hearts of lions, mostly using crowbars. It wasn't pretty. He starved them for days; he made them lick his boots. Wild animal rights weren't a thing at all yet, but occasionally people would ask Nest something to the effect of, ''Really?'' Nest replied that he was demonstrating man’s superior role in creation. His performances were really religious experiences, he argued. He was big on religion, in fact, at least as he understood it. He organized lion shows on church holy days and even re-enacted scenes from the Bible, like Isaiah 11:6: “The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf, the lion and the fatling together, and the little child to lead them.” Darla took the role of the little child in these spectacles. Nest taught her how to control the animals, and later, she even stepped into the cage alone. The crowd held their breath. They thought they knew this story! This tiny, blonde girl approaching the predators... surely, she was lunch! But, of course, it turned out the girl was the one to fear.

Darla also showed incredible talent for riding. Sometimes, other circus artists tried to teach her a trick and got the instruction wrong. Darla didn’t listen to them and did it right instead. There are some acts that it takes months or years to learn and some whose secret her mother had never told anyone. Young Darla learned them all in a matter of weeks. People sometimes only suggested to her that there was a trick that her mother could do; a little while later, they saw her do it. As Darla grew, she began to look uncannily like her mother, too, her fair hair glinting in the sun just the same as she rode for practice between shows.

There may have been some sort of disagreement between Darla and her father, because in the 1850s, Darla took her favorite stallion Angel and went off on a solo tour. She lost the horse somehow during that tour, but returned accompanied by a husband** – an Irishman who took the stage name Angelus. They also returned from the tour with a kid! People were quick to comment that the child didn’t look like Darla at all. In fact, she looked about three, when Darla had only been gone on tour for a year. So folks speculated that they’d kidnapped the girl. Other, more creative folks speculated the truth could be even more sinister. The newcomer had sharp nails that could draw blood, and there was a strange gleam to her eyes in some lights, maybe a teensy echo of a hiss in her voice. We do know that in Darla’s luggage, there was a locked chest seemingly filled with fur.

The name of this fey child was Drusilla. Drusilla had, from early days, strange power over animals and people alike. Her eyes were big and captivating. She told fortune and talked to animals. She danced with an albino cobra, wearing scandalously form-hugging clothing that didn’t even have sleeves. Nobody could figure out where she got this snake, since albino cobras are very rare. The story goes that she bid a meerkat come to her when they'd briefly stopped by the Cape of Good Hope on a return trip from Madagascar. Drusilla hid the creature in the folds of her skirt, and out slithered a white snake. They became inseparable. Pretty much everyone else was terrified of the snake, which never got defanged. Even its venom glands were intact; and it was a Cape cobra, which can kill with one bite. Drusilla just smiled, caressed the snake draping over her shoulders like some nude feather boa and called it her “darling, deadly boy”. The snake lived with her. Nobody questioned this; the rest of the troupe gave Drusilla’s quarters a wide berth anyway, because she kept a big collection of dolls with haunting gazes and uncannily natural-looking hair. Drusilla called the dolls her children. She also called the circus animals her children. Sometimes, it wasn’t clear which she was talking about.

By 1880, Nest was going on 90 years old. People who had witnessed Darla’s birth started to wonder if they all really would keep going till Judgment Day (and whether this sounded fun). However, Nest’s health was poor, no doubt because of all the leaky roofs, and he didn’t see the light of day much anymore. Darla managed the business side of the circus, and Drusilla was the new princess of the company, the favorite of the public. Angelus, in the meantime, took over the artistic refinement of the program. He introduced trapeze acts accompanied by soaring classical music. The trapeze artists were so flexible, it looked like some of them could turn their feet backwards or that there was no direction in which their hands wouldn't smoothly swivel at the wrist. There was something exotic in their appearance. One wondered where people are born with such long hands and feet. The animal acts got elaborate, too. Zebras tap danced, capybaras escaped from tanks of water, and a murder of crows played the piano! Angelus himself performed some illusion acts, like sawing women in half and turning animals into people.

Angelus thought the snake act should be more bloody, so he tried to make the snake fight other animals. However, training the albino cobra never did yield results. Angelus often said it was a useless creature, since it needed taming just to act like a real snake. Drusilla maintained that her darling was the realest snake, born to make crowds scream. When Drusilla told the stubborn cobra to fight – or, actually, as soon as Angelus stopped telling it to – the snake did. But usually, it just followed Dru. When Drusilla told fortune, the snake was present, as if a corpse had laid a white, possessive arm over her shoulders, and it  _looked_ at people. People said that whoever stared into the snake’s eyes would go missing in short order. The police received countless accusations of kidnapping around that time. The witnesses said Drusilla would silently consult the snake and choose someone, seemingly. That person would act dazed and disappear later that night. And the circus staff rumored that for every disappearance, the number of Drusilla’s creepy dolls grew by one. The circus train was searched repeatedly, but no kidnappees were ever found. They just found a bunch of animals and those foreign acrobats with their strange features, staring mutely.

As 1900 neared and some religious movements began anticipating the end of the world again, Heinrich Nest’s zeal for collecting animals increased, unbelievably, again. This time, he planned a Noah’s Ark act with pairs of as many animals as he could possibly get his hands on. The stage swayed to imitate the movement of a ship, and the band played the storm motif from Wagner's ''The Flying Dutchman''. Preparing this act took up all the time between regular shows, and some of the artists joked that at this rate they’d only have a day off once every seven years. Also, with the increased amount of animals, living conditions on the train began to get cramped even for people. To hear it told, everyone who had any sense left Nest’s circus by this point, so the stories told by former members of the troupe end here. We only know for sure that eventually, the circus lost popularity and Nest even briefly went to jail for cruelty against animals and other stuff.

However, within a certain British organization that predates the police, the wildest stories are told about the investigation that eventually led to Nest’s arrest. Early 20th century animal rights activists Yuki Makimura and Xin Rong get the credit for gathering the first evidence. It is said that Yuki snuck onto the circus train illegally***, risking an encounter with the white cobra, who was notorious among Yuki's colleagues for fighting trespassers to the death. Yuki found a whole carriage filled with furs and feathers, and then she was transformed into a wolf for 8 whole months after Drusilla discovered her! In this legend, the Yuki-wolf followed the circus and attracted attention by her mournful howling (which, arguably, must have added to the ambiance and helped them sell more tickets). It is also claimed that these furs and feathers belonged to the ''foreign'' acrobats. When that carriage was eventually found and opened with some help from a large wolf (three guesses who the wolf was), they say many of the acrobats took their skins and ran/crawled/flew/skittered away. Or they tried to; not all of them found their old skins in working order, it seems. Drusilla was supposedly seen that day clutching a too small, almost completely moth-eaten catskin, the white snake winding around her as if to console. Xin, for her part, apparently infiltrated the troupe as a faker-than-usual mermaid and got a tip to cut the strings that Drusilla’s dolls were tied with. And when she did that, the circus animals turned into people who had long been missing – at least that's what people say.

Be that all as it may, members of Nest’s circus were seen here and there incredibly late in the 20th century. Angelus parted ways with the company under mysterious circumstances****, but still guest-starred in some performances later, or else it was someone who matched his description exactly. Darla toured Europe with Drusilla and a small group of artists and animals under the name of the Whirlwind of Fun (this is the latest name of Nest’s circus, which is preserved in the legend). Trick riding got old, much the same that Darla should have. Darla, however, still looked young and took up sharpshooting. She shot cigarettes out of Angelus’ mouth and buttons off his coat. The Whirlwind didn’t always avoid entering buildings, so they left something of a trail of carnage behind them. Sometimes they showed up at a theater or opera (more than one chandelier incident was blamed on them). Other times, they even risked performing indoors. By now, the legend of their roof-challenged condition was well-known, so managers of circuses and theaters generally made a tiny hole in their buildings rather than turn down the talented, temperamental troupe with the snake that had the evil eye. If they refused to let the Whirlwind in, not only would the manager in question probably disappear, but, soon, a new animal would be added to the circus, and people always noticed resemblances between the missing-presumed-dead and the animal. Nobody wants to tour the Earth till Judgment Day.

Anyway, this is the story of the Whirlwind Circus as it was told to me. :) If you’ve heard a different version or had any experiences with the Whirlwind yourself, I welcome any additions!

 

\---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------  
*There’s a cedar in St Albans called the Whispering Tree. Local legend says that one mustn’t talk when passing under the tree’s branches, or one may never find the way home.  
**As seen in the National Library of Ireland’s database, in the parish register of the Collegiate Church of St. Nicholas in Galway there's a note by the pastor who married them. It says, “Don’t think they meant it.”  
***I feel I should be clear that no inspector of the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty against Animals would do this unless they were historical and also somewhat embellished by legend.  
****Some people say that a Romani tribe was involved, namely the Usuri. Well, the Whirlwind never did use bears again. They said the bears frightened the other animals; this was maybe true, but it hadn’t been true before. However, reliable sources prove that the Usuri theory is really only a rumor.  



End file.
